Market trends and smart tips

Angela304
Level 2
Portreath, United Kingdom

Market trends and smart tips

The market trends in the Calander page seems to be quite new,   our area is showing massive drops in searches on this compared to last year (-50% to - 80%) is this the same for everyone,  this would seem odd and surely suggest that Airbnb were in some sort of trouble!  I've noticed alongside this that our smart price tips that used to be massively undervalue are now above what we would charge a night.  Is anyone else seeing this?  We have been 'selected' for Airbnb Plus but reading up on it this seems a bad idea but could they be pushing views that way which is why searches are down so massively?

19 Replies 19
Branka-and-Silvia0
Level 10
Zagreb, Croatia

@Angela304

this time of the year people go skiing so maybe UK is not hot destination at the moment. It could also be because of the massive snow in Austria, Switzerland and Germany causing traffic problems

 

November, January and February are slow here too. We dropped our prices to the rock bottom but still got just few bookings. I consider closing until March, it is not worth heating bills.

It's not so much that it's slow (we don't open bookings until mid March anyway and have probably around the same number of already booked Summer dates as last year) but that the market trends that they list which I'm assuming is for an aera (I would think for us it would be West Cornwall) says that it's down 50-80% on searches,  so that's the searches that Airbnb are getting compared to last year,  if Airbnb really are getting 50-80% less people searching for an area that's concerning,  especially as they say they have 50%+ more available listings,  this is what it shows for March:

 

Market trends
March 2019
Guest searches
-84%
Available listings
+53%
Booked guests
6% - 22%
 
And it says:
 
Guest searches and available listings
Available listings compete for guests who are searching. You might consider raising your price when more guests are searching, but you’ll also want to keep in mind how many listings are available.

Pete28
Level 10
Seattle, WA

Brexit !

 

But seriously, in the UK and US the Airbnb website is showing only base price on the map and price sliders which makes it almost impossible to search by total price which if the market is crowded will have disastrous consequences for bookings.

 

no idea why Airbnb did this about 2 months back but it is killing business...

Marie82
Level 10
New South Wales, Australia

@Angela304 i think u are correct ABB market is very slow, never experienced such a slow last few months for years. 

Pete28
Level 10
Seattle, WA

I think the only ones to survive will be those with low fixed overheads - suite in primary etc. having to pay mortgage, property tax, utilities etc  on $40/night is suicide.

Kelly149
Level 10
Austin, TX

yes, my trends show traffic down, listings up and recommend prices as low as $25/night (for a 1300sqft entire space!!!)

 

the pricing I'm ignoring, and based on the lousy guests I've had over the last year, perhaps as abb reaches market saturation then guests are realizing (as many of us hosts are) that they are better suited to hotels.

I'm not sure that one half of Airbnb knows what the other is doing. The app lists total price, the website base price. Most listings have a low base and high cleaning fee which makes it utterly  annoying to search by price.

 

Airbnb seems desperate to,grow plus, but that will just create a bifurcated market, both of which will be saturated.

 

Airbnb customers are by their nature highly price sensitive, so hiding the total price and creating a more expensive offshoot don't seem like winning ideas...

Angela304
Level 2
Portreath, United Kingdom

Very similar to us then but our smart pricing tips have just gone through the roof!  It's a big place usually shared by two familys around early July, not in any school holidays, smart tips are suggesting £270 where we are charging £210,  previous years their suggestions have been around £100 a night for a  2800sqft house!

 

It does make me think now that all these tips and trends are just made up to test how hosts react to them.

In order to get business I am listing at half the price tip. The lower end of the price tip I think is based on the lowest price you set, so they don't really reflect the market price especially in a saturated area like Seattle.

 

It's much better to pick a price point at which you have 20-30 other properties, not 300+. 

 

If if I do $40 night I'm in 10-20 properties, $60 is 300+. Of course that doesn't inc the cleaning fee which makes the whole price search iditiotic...

Helen427
Level 10
Auckland, New Zealand

@Angela304@Kelly149@Pete28@Marie82@Branka-and-Silvia0

Hospitality in general hits a slump in the hotle trade to over Christmas / New Years holiday period as people tend to spend time with family.

It's always been like that since I can remember from years ago of working in the Hotel trade.

 

That siad maybe Airbnb should throw a spanner in the works, so to speak and drum up some good publicity to counter act some of the silly over the top negative ones that get media traction.

 

All the best

but @Helen427 this market data is showing declines in Year over Year searches, not saying that January is lower than March. It is saying that this January is significantly down from last January (and every other month that I can see...)

Angela304
Level 2
Portreath, United Kingdom

And this seems to be the case for everyone in every location which is odd and I don't believe!   If they are true why would Airbnb share this information that would surely make people think 'OK,  I'll leave a sinking ship!'  

Or they are stupid enough to publish internal stats which they thought would always be positive.

 

Another way of getting the same data is to pick a weekday in Jan and do a web search and it will tell you what % is booked. It is typically only about 25% in Seattle which is pathetic even for Jan.

 

There is a healthy business to be had in meeting the actual needs of Airbnb customers - offer low priced quality accommodation without gouging on cleaning fees. If I do $50-$60 / night inc cleaning for 1bed apt I'm happy. Everyone else wants to charge that much just to clean !

Angela304
Level 2
Portreath, United Kingdom

That could be the case,  it does seem highly sensitive company data.

 

We are actually OK with the bookings so far,  we made the mistake of blocking it all off in October as we don't list until mid March (we get storms between October and March!) and then we opened up bookings again at the end of December for the 2019 season,  but this means we din't show up in searches and so we fell down the listings as it seems heavily view weighted,  the more views you get the more you get shown.

 

Annoyingly the Airbnb calander doesn't show past years and that would be really useful after a few years as you would start to see your easily booked dates and those you struggle with at a glance.   I'm off to look for a tool to sync the calander to that can do that now!